How Yoga Helped Me Understand My Queerness

For as long as I can remember, I have felt equally masculine and feminine. When I was a child, my best friend and I were always playing dress up, enacting the various fairy tales with which we were enamored. She and I would alternate who played the knight and who played the princess, who saved whom from whatever malevolent forces we conjured in our minds. I couldn’t articulate why it made me happy to occupy both of these spaces, because in midwestern America in the early 90s, that language wasn’t accessible to me.

At around 12 years old, my classmates and I were separated into gendered middle schools. Like sharks smelling blood in the water, boys at that age are vicious when they sense anyone to be the slightest bit different. Anything that resembled feminine behavior was met with bullying and wrath. I was cut off from an entire side of myself, without the words to articulate that pain. As many of us queer folk know, that type of bullying at such a formative time creates deep psychic scars, ones that stay with us. My femininity became linked with shame — a connection that has resurfaced numerous times in my life, and affected many of my romantic relationships.

After moving to New York City in my early 20s, I found a home in the fashion industry, which helped me to experiment with aesthetic presentations of gender. I let my hair grow long. I grew a beard. I wore skirts made for men (thanks, Riccardo Tisci). As the conversation surrounding gender fluidity and nonconformity began to take shape in our culture, I started to feel more and more understood on a surface level. There was just one problem: I had no comparable spiritual solution. While I still felt connected to my faith and my own concept of God, I didn’t have a practice or belief structure that recognized the understanding I had developed about my identity.

As a means of navigating an increasingly confusing world, I took up yoga. Primarily, I did it to stay fit and reduce stress levels, which were quite high thanks to my job as a magazine editor. An hour-long Vinyasa made me feel better, but that was about as deep as my understanding of the practice went — until a long series of events including the presidential election, a Cacao ceremony with a Guatemalan shaman, and a conversation with Stevie Nicks led me to leave said job in order to do an intensive training and become a yoga teacher.

My training was in Hatha yoga, which, if you practice in the West, is likely what you’re practicing. While there are almost as many translations of the Sanskrit word yoga as there are schools of practice, the most common is union. “Hatha” traditionally means physical, as in the means by which we find said union (through physical practice using the Asanas or poses). As I would learn, “Hatha” is also sometimes interpreted as “sun-moon” (“Ha” meaning sun and “tha” meaning moon). Yoga, then, is achieving balance between all our so-called opposing forces — including the masculine and feminine. That’s why everything in yoga is taught alternating between the two sides of the body, the right being associated with the sun (masculine energy) and the left linked with the moon (feminine energy).

Without knowing it, I was already participating in a belief system that confirmed understandings I’d had about myself — understandings that society had attempted to distort.

Yes, in yogic philosophy, it’s understood that all beings possess both types of energy. The energy of Shiva represents the masculine, static consciousness, and Shakti represents the feminine, dynamic consciousness; in other words, Shiva is the idea, and Shakti is the energy that brings that idea to life. Regardless of the body into which we’re born in this lifetime, we need to access both energies in order to reach our highest potential. Shakti is said to exist like a coiled serpent of energy (Kundalini) at the base of the spine (the first chakra, or energy center). Through various physical and mental activities — Asana, breathing exercises, and meditation — we coax her energy up the spine via the Ida and Pingala nadis (the feminine and masculine channels), intersecting at each chakra all the way up to the crown of the head (the seventh chakra), where Shakti fuses with Shiva and we find union (also known as that moment of enlightenment or bliss you may have experienced during Savasana). It’s a literal, physical, and spiritual embodiment of the idea that we need both our masculine and feminine qualities.

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I often wonder what my life would have looked like had someone explained this concept to me as a kid, rather than society telling me what type of boy I was meant to be. What if instead of learning about Adam and Eve in church, I had been singing about Hare and Krishna? (Hare is another name for Radha, the female form of the male Hindu deity Krishna — chanting both their names, is a celebration of the duality in all beings.) What if I had learned that my dual nature wasn’t something to be ashamed of, but rather that it was divine? For starters, I wouldn’t have had to create a chasm between my sexuality and spirituality. I wouldn’t have spent countless first dates with other gay men attempting to enact some paradigm of masculinity out of fear of being rejected — and perhaps I wouldn’t have rejected others for not meeting the same standard. Maybe I would have grown up more like my partner, who is entirely unphased by gender.

It’s important to note that, while yoga primarily stems from Hinduism, it has roots in numerous other religions, including Buddhism and Jainism, and can thus be understood more as a mystical or philosophical practice. As Sri Swami Satchidananda explained it, “Truth is One, Paths are Many” — a principle that has been adopted by many of modern yoga’s founding parents who were responsible for bringing the practice out West in the 20th century. Now, it’s become a phenomenon; in 2016, a study by the Yoga Alliance and Yoga Journal found that there were 36 million practitioners in the U.S. alone — almost double from what it was in 2012. Is it a coincidence, then, that this dramatic increase of a spiritual practice that recognizes gender as a universal energy independent from the physical body has occurred alongside the beginning of a cultural devolution of old-world gender constructs and polarities? I would venture that this is all linked to an awakening of consciousness, and the same “wokeness” that we’ve seen arising in other aspects of our culture as of late.

Diving deeper into the practice made it clear why I had been drawn to it in the first place. Without knowing it, I was already participating in a belief system that confirmed understandings I’d had about myself — understandings that society had attempted to distort. As one of my teachers recently put it, “Yoga is the practice of undoing.” It’s an unlearning of what we’ve been told — about ourselves, our bodies, and our place in all this — so that we can honor our own truth and remember that we are all divine. If that’s not queer, I don’t know what is.

William Defebaugh is a culture and wellness writer and yoga teacher living in New York City. He is currently the Senior Features Editor at L’Officiel USA and teaches at Laughing Lotus Yoga Center.

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